Justice in the Web of Life: Some Considerations
Under the looming specter of mass extinction and escalating climate change, life itself becomes the terrain of various justice struggles. As philosopher Eva von Redecker notes, many recent social justice movements, including climate (“Extinction Rebellion”), feminist (“Ni una menos”), anti-racist (“I can’t breathe”) and Indigenous (“Water is life”) mobilizations explicitly make reference to the politics of life. At the same time, technological developments in the life sciences challenge traditional philosophical accounts of the very meaning of life. According to Erica Borg and Amadeo Policante, genomic science and its biological applications are “drastically transforming the constitutive relationship between what Charles Darwin called ‘the economy of nature’ and political economy; between biological and social life; between living beings and capital.” In response to these new theoretical challenges, this paper attempts to provide a basic account of the relationship between life and justice. I defend a minimal process-relational approach to life that recognizes both the evolving nature of life (life as living) and its inherent interconnectivity (life as co-living). I argue that injustices are best understood as structurally extractive or exploitative arrangements between different elements in the web of life. Justice, thus, primarily refers to the processes of repair and transformation that counter such arrangements and in turn strengthen eco-social arrangements of mutual support and flourishing. Notably, from such an angle, justice cannot be reduced to the (re)distribution of harms and benefits, but rather refers to arrangements that produce certain distributive outcomes. In this regard, my account also echoes the structuralist critique of capability approach articulated by Nancy Fraser and others in its focus on (eco-)social arrangements rather than at well-being on an individual level.